One Response to WTF, my name is a google adword?

Look what I found, a comment from Jakob Nielson on John Battelle’s blog on this subject: http://battellemedia.com/archives/002570.php
I don’t see why you want to run ads for those keywords anyway. Words like “searchblog” and “dooce” don’t come up in normal conversation. It’s really hard to imagine anybody searching for these words except if they wanted to locate that website.
In other words, users would almost certainly have a highly specific goal: to get that site. If the site is the #1 organic hit (which they are), there’s no reason for users to look over at the ads. Even if they did, it’s not likely that the user would be sidetracked from their main goal.
This means that running the ad is only to protect you from those few cases where the user specifically wanted to get your site but was sidetracked by a more promising ad. By having your own ad on top of that other ad, you could prevent a tiny fraction of users to move their eye that bit further down the page. (In eyetracking, we see a phenomenon where users stop scanning ads once they enounter certain types of blockers.)
Seems like a very small amount of added traffic in return for paying for ads. This would be worth doing for a site that sold big-ticket, high-margin products, such as a high-end B2B site. But for a content site, where you presumably make a fraction of a cent per page view, I don’t think it’s worth advertising your own name.
* Posted by: Jakob Nielsen [TypeKey Profile Page]
* May 16, 2006 08:00 AM